Good Morning!!

New York Magazine’s latest cover features 35 women who say they were drugged and sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby. At the moment the link to the “13-page photo essay” is unavailable–apparently the site has crashed.

“Listen, he was America’s favorite dad,” saidBarbara Bowman, who says she was raped as a 17-year-old actress. She made her case public in 2004, when testifying on behalf of Andrea Constand, who said she was also one of Cosby’s victims.

“I went into this thinking he was going to be my dad,” Bowman told the magazine. “To wake up half-dressed and raped by the man that said he was going to love me like a father? That’s pretty sick.

“It was hard for America to digest when this came out. And a lot of backlash and a lot denial and a lot of anger.”

Spelman College announced Friday that it is discontinuing an endowed professorship named for Bill Cosby and his wife. “The William and Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Endowed Professorship at Spelman College has been discontinued and related funds have been returned to the Clara Elizabeth Jackson Carter Foundation,” said a statement from the college. A spokeswoman declined to comment further. Bill and Camille Cosby are major donors to Spelman and an academic building is named for Camille Cosby. The Clara Elizabeth Jackson Carter Foundation was created by Bill Cosby to provide grants to historically black colleges.

The hardest thing for many people to understand about this is the way Camille Cosby has stood by her husband through the many years it has taken for this entire ugly business to play out. Was she simply in denial? Was she reluctant to give up the money and fame that came with being the wife of a powerful man? We may never know, but she was apparently an active force in her husband’s defense.

Bill Cosby’s wife knows her husband is a serial philanderer, but believes his scores of accusers consented to drugs and sex, two confidants of the couple say.

Last week’s revelation that Cosby admitted during a deposition that he intended to ply women with Quaaludes before bedding them barely fazed Camille Cosby, the ­insiders told The Post.

“Camille still doesn’t believe that Bill provided drugs and had sex with women without their consent,” said a source employed by the Cosby family. “She’s well aware of his cheating, but she doesn’t believe that her husband is a rapist.”

Mrs. Cosby is “a proud, dignified but stubborn woman. You can say that she’s standing by her husband, but really, the more people stand against him, the more she perceives it as an affront to her and all that she’s done to make him a star,” said another source who’s done business with the ­Cosbys and remains close to them.

Camille Cosby, 71, who is also her 78-year-old husband’s business manager, demanded last week at a crisis meeting with advisers that their lawyers and p.r. specialists “get back out in front of this,” the business source said.

“I created him, I knew what I was getting and we’ll fix this,” she told the gathering at a meeting at the couple’s Shelburne Falls, Mass., home Tuesday night.

There’s more disgusting stuff at the link. According to the Post’s sources, Camille was also angered that longtime Cosby defenders have been changing their positions in light of recent revelations.

It is easy and tempting to make assumptions about Camille Cosby. “That poor woman,” some say. “That idiot,” say others. And, to some, she is “that monster.” Pity or vilification are the textbook responses to spouses in these cases. Watching and waiting for Camille’s next move, I’m reminded of last year’s TODAYinterview with Dottie Sandusky (wife of Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, who in 2012 was found guilty of sexually abusing 10 boys)….

Last week, The New York Post shared a widelyreported story that Camille (also her husband’s business manager) had held a crisis meeting with Bill’s team to discuss damage control. “I created him. I knew what I was getting, and we’ll fix this,” she was quoted by a source as having said. It was also alleged that she referred to the “infidelities” as an embarrassment she’d long since reconciled herself with, and emphasized them as just that — affairs, and not assaults.

Of course, reports like this should be taken with a hefty handful of salt, but it’s worth noting that Camille’s supposed remarks are certainly in keeping with Cosby’s own in the deposition. Both reveal the kind of psychological gymnastics that allow someone to leap over the evidence at hand — to find acceptable, ordinary dalliances where many would see something much more sinister….

To believe that Camille Cosby is an evil, calculating accomplice to the crimes her husband’s been accused of would be to ignore the possibility that she’s just another victim of those same alleged crimes.

Conversely, to believe that Dottie Sandusky is merely a naive grandma would be to ignore the magnificent power of deliberate denial. We know nothing of the internal lives of these women, nor can we speak to the dynamic of their marriages. Is it likely they knew of their husbands’ actions? Certainly. It is just as likely that they were subject to manipulation and abuse themselves.

The point being: One does not cancel out the other. It’s a cognitive dissonance that neither mainstream media nor its consumers can seem to resolve. We want clear answers and archetypes, and instead we’re stuck with real people, none of whom are entirely good or entirely monstrous.

I suppose Miller has a point, but it’s difficult for me to have much sympathy with either of these enabling wives. Each of these women appear to have actively covered up their husbands’ criminal behavior and allowed these men to damage the lives of so many young men and women.

Sandra Bland

Also in the news . . .

Waller County was named for Edwin Waller, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico in 1836, who four years later became the first elected mayor of Austin. Whites make up 44 percent of the 47,000 residents, Hispanics 29 percent and blacks 25 percent.

First settled in the early 1820s, the area became home to slave-labor cotton plantations. Hempstead was incorporated in 1858 thanks to a railroad terminus.

The plantations were dismantled with the end of the Civil War in 1865. Three years later, historical records report a race riot, followed by unrest in the 1880s, when a White Man’s Party was established to blunt active black political participation in the county where blacks outnumbered whites.

That’s when violence blamed on the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups gave it the “Six Shooter” sobriquet.

More recently, voter intimidation and voting-rights complaints have arisen from students at Prairie View A&M University, a college established in 1876 specifically to train black teachers.

The complaints led to a federal lawsuit. The district attorney at the time, in 2004, reached a settlement and apologized. But the issue resurfaced only two years later and again in 2008, when additional early voting sites in the county were established only after federal pressure.

“There’s a lot of prejudice going on,” said Eugene Hood, citing a history of police harassment as he cut hair at Chad’s Barber Shop on University Drive, just south of where Bland was arrested outside the main entrance to the university.

Marie Armstrong of Dallas, a Prairie View senior, remembers being pulled over and ticketed for a broken brake light and being forced to go court. She wished police would exercise some judgment.

Neal Falls, the man shot to death by a prostitute after he attacked her on Saturday, had a cache of weapons and a list of online escorts inside his vehicle, police said Wednesday.

The items, as well as statements the woman said Falls made to her, led police to suspect he may have been involved in other unsolved crimes.

“He had a machete, shovel, two axes, a bunch of knives, a double-headed ax, a bulletproof vest, numerous sets of handcuffs, as well as the firearm used to kill him,” Lt. Steve Cooper of the Charleston, West Virginia, police department, told The Huffington Post.

Police also found a list containing the names of an unspecified number of women inside the man’s vehicle.

Photo of Neil Falls surrounded by photos of the “murder kit” police found in his car. (Source: Huffington Post)

More details from a previous report by Lohr:

The man…was shot and killed in Charleston, West Virginia, on Saturday, according to WCHS-TV. The incident reportedly occurred after he met a female escort through Backpage.com, an online classified ad portal that is often used by men seeking prostitutes.

“The details that we’re able to release right now are that there was a struggle … that the man had beaten and strangled the woman and gotten her onto the ground, laid the gun down as he was dragging her back through the house, and she was able to pick the gun up and fire over her shoulder blindly, and the bullet did strike the man, killing him,” Charleston Police Lt. Steve Cooper told the Charleston Gazette on Saturday.

Police in nearby Chillicothe, OH, are looking into the possibility that Falls could be responsible for the disappearances of 6 Ohio women.

“We are in communication with Charleston regarding that situation,” Bud Lytle, a spokesman and crime prevention officer for the Chillicothe Police Department, told The Huffington Post. “Obviously, it’s not a great distance from us and it involved a prostitute and an individual known to pick up prostitutes.”

Falls, who was originally from Oregon, is also be investigated by authorities in Nevada, according to Lohr: Neal Falls Investigation Expands To Las Vegas-Area Dismemberments: EXCLUSIVE

“We received information that caused a conversation to take place between us and law enforcement in Henderson, Nevada,” Lt. Steve Cooper of the Charleston, West Virginia, police department, told The Huffington Post on Thursday.

Cooper said he couldn’t discuss specific cases Nevada authorities are now looking into because the investigation “is ongoing and we don’t want to risk comprising [sic] it.”

The FBI also is investigating, a law enforcement source told The Huffington Post on Friday. A spokesman didn’t immediately answer a request for comment.

This turned into a post about crime, but–as I have written previously–for me rape and sexual assault are political issues. Crimes against women and children are often ignored and covered up in our society, with the media as enabler.

Movie shooter John Russell Houser

Just take a look at Dakinikat’s post from yesterday. She points out that the media are largely ignoring the fact that Louisiana mass shooter John Russell Houser specifically targeted women who were watching a movie created by a feminist.

Police in Lafayette, Louisiana are evidently struggling to understand why the outspokenly misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic John Russell “Rusty” Houser murdered two women and wounded 9 other moviegoers at a showing of “Trainwreck,” a film written by and starring Amy Schumer, a feminist comedian with a Jewish father, known for joking frankly about sex.

Please check out Dak’s post if you haven’t read it yet.

What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a nice Monday.

Good Morning

Well, they sure are creepy, yes?

——————>

Sort of like a Twilight Zone nightmare.

I don’t know why I decided to adorn today’s thread with images of mannequins but so it goes. There has to be some hidden meaning behind it, if I was feeling better I probably could figure what that was…

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe made a historical court decision on Monday. Judge Jaffe ordered that two chimpanzees have the legal writ of Habeas Corpus. The two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, were undergoing biomedical experiments at the Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York.

The Non-Human Rights project is the group responsible for the lawsuit. It is just the latest in a serious of legal attempts to grant personhood rights to non-human animals. Stony Brook University is now required to go into court and argue that they have a legally valid reason for keeping Hercules and Leo in captivity.

The Non-Human Rights Project is requesting that the chimpanzees be released to a sanctuary for chimps. In a previous lawsuit by the Non-Human Rights Project, a writ of Habeas Corpus was denied for the chimpanzee, Kiko, under the grounds that the chimpanzee would have been released to a sanctuary, rather than be freed. Under Habeas Corpus, prisoners can challenge their imprisonment, though they cannot use it to challenge the conditions of their imprisonment. That decision is being appealed by the group, and is to be brought before the New York State Supreme Court.

“This is a big step forward to getting what we are ultimately seeking: the right to bodily liberty for chimpanzees and other cognitively complex animals. We got our foot in the door. And no matter what happens that door can never be completely shut again.”

Okay, I have a problem with this. With women’s rights being fucked left and right all over the US, don’t tell me that one day an ape will have more rights than a human female.

But the article continues:

However not everyone feels that non-human animals have a right to laws traditionally reserved for humans. Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California told Science:

“The judge may merely want more information to make a decision on the legal personhood claim, and may have ordered a hearing simply as a vehicle for hearing out both parties in more depth. It would be quite surprising if the judge intended to make a momentous substantive finding that chimpanzees are legal persons if the judge has not yet heard the other side’s arguments.”

According to Science, Pristine plans to use this win for future lawsuits. She says:

“We have the scientific evidence to prove in a court of law that elephants, great apes, and whales and dolphins are autonomous beings and deserve the right to bodily liberty.”

You know what, I think Women deserve the right to fucking “bodily liberty.”

According to KFVS, three city officials — “the city attorney, the city clerk, and the waste water treatment plant supervisor” — turned in their resignations as well. In their letters to the outgoing mayor, Randall Ramsey, they cited “safety concerns”.

Tyrus Bird, the black woman in question and the former city clerk, narrowly beat Ramsay, who held the mayorship for nearly 37 years, and said in a speech that she had no idea what these “safety concerns” were.

It is just ridiculous. Video at the link. And if you really want to get ill, read the comments on that Mediaite thread.

“At the end of the day someone lost their life. It could have been them. It could have been one of their family members. I just think it wasn’t right. People feel with freedom of speech they get to do whatever they want to do. I think they abuse it.”

After reading about that town in Missouri, something like this is exactly what I would expect from those racist assholes.

One of the couple dozen survivors of that migrant ship that sunk on the way from Libya to Italysays the smugglers locked hundreds of people in the hold before it went under. Estimates of the dead, all based on survivor accounts, range from 700 to 950 people aboard, with only 28 survivors found so far. As this article notes, the lack of bodies – only 24 have been found so far – makes more sense if they’re all contained locked inside the ship.

After weeks of difficult negotiations, the Senate on Tuesday reached an agreement to clear the way for a long-delayed confirmation vote on Loretta E. Lynch to replace Eric H. Holder Jr. as the attorney general.

The vote was scheduled for Thursday morning after senators announced a compromise on the main debate in legislation to help victims of sex trafficking, an unrelated bill that entangled Ms. Lynch’s nomination after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said he would not schedule a confirmation vote until the Senate passed it. Ms. Lynch has been waiting more than five months for the Senate to vote.

“I’m thrilled we were finally able to come together to break the impasse over this vital legislation,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, the main sponsor of the bill. “I look forward to swift passage in the Senate so we can ensure victims of human trafficking receive the resources they need to restore their lives.”

But as Tuesday wore on without further action on the bill, it became clear that the deal had not ensured smooth passage on the floor. Discussions continued behind the scenes on amendments to the trafficking legislation, including on some more controversial, unrelated measures, congressional aides said. Votes on the amendments were scheduled for Wednesday.

Perhaps I spoke too soon.

Y’all been following the Blue Bell roulette? I call it that because we still have been buying the stuff in our house and eating the little tubs of Homestyle Vanilla…in a sort of Russian Roulette, ice cream style. Now they are recalling the entire lot.

Federal officials have linked two more listeria illnesses to Blue Bell Creameries products, a day after the Brenham, Texas-based company issued a nationwide recall of all of its products due to an ongoing outbreak of the potentially fatal foodborne illness.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one person in Arizona and another in Oklahoma have been sickened byListeria monocytogenes bacteria with DNA fingerprints matching those collected from Blue Bell product samples. Previously, three patients in Texas and five others in Kansas had been linked to the outbreak. All 10 patients were hospitalized, and three in Kansas died, officials said. The illnesses date as far back as January 2010.

For the first time in its 108 year history, the company has issued a total recall.

Blue Bell is voluntarily pulling all products from store shelves worldwide after more tests came back that more ice cream tested positive for the listeria bacteria — which can make children, the elderly, and pregnant women sick.

Joe Robinson, a company spokesman says, “We’re serious about this and we will find this.”

The company has a team from the FDA, state and local health inspectors, and a microbiologist helping figure out why some of their products contained the listeria bacteria.

The company is still making a limited amount of ice cream in Brenham, and is having the products tested, before they can be sold.

Robertson says, “We want to come back and at some point, go from crawling to walking and then hopefully earn the people’s trust back.”

Joanne Kasten agrees, “Blue Bell has been a pristine company for a long time. I think this is a bump in the road, I really do.”

The company hopes to have some of its products back in stores by early next week, and if all goes well, have store shelves re-stocked within two to three weeks.

Blue Bell won’t say how much this is costing, other than to say the recall involves eight million gallons of ice cream.

I love Blue Bell, I could probably eat all that eight million gallons myself.

The post is getting long so lets do the rest of the links in dump fashion.

French photographer Gustave Gain (1876-1945) was born in Cherbourg, France on June 27, 1876. As a chemist he keens on photography and related technical achievements. After the invention of the Autochrome by the Lumière brothers, Gustave is actively engaged in color photograph.

Gustave Gain loves beach. In the summer, he spent much time with his family on the coast of the English Channel in Brittany and Normandy, where he took a lot of stunning shots of his wife, Adeline and other women.

An old leather sex toy dating back to the 18th century was found by surprised archaeologists during a dig in Poland.

The eight-inch dildo filled with rough bristles was discovered during an excavation that could have been the site of an old school of swordsmanship in the northern coastal city of Gdansk.

A spokesman for the Regional Office for the Protection of Monuments in Gdansk, which found the penis-shaped object in the Podwalu district, said: “It was found in the latrine and dates back to the second half of the 18th century.”

“It is quite thick and rather large, made of leather and filled with bristles, and has a wooden tip that has preserved in excellent condition. It was probably dropped by someone in the toilet.

“Whether that was by accident or on purpose is anyone’s guess though,” they added.

Wooden swords found on the site by the archaeologists led them to conclude that the place was once a school of swordsmanship.

Wow, that leaves me almost speechless…

Lili Von Shtupp: Would you like another schnitzengruben?

Bart: No, thank you. Fifteen is my limit on schnitzengruben.

Dr. Frankenstein: For the experiment to be a success, all of the body parts must be enlarged.

Inga: His veins, his feet, his hands, his organs vould all have to be increased in size.

Dr. Frankenstein: Precisely.

Inga: [her eyes get wide] He vould have an enormous schwanzschtücker.

Dr. Frankenstein: [ponders this a moment] That goes without saying.

Inga: Voof.

Igor: He’s going to be very popular.

That’ll do nicely.

Since you have seen something as horrid as that…how about this:

A friend of mine posted this on her Facebook, oof, talk about polar opposites.

I guess I have given you some images to disgust your eyes for the day, how about some links to give your brain a going over:

The extreme danger faced by migrants crossing the Mediterranean in small, rickety vessels was highlighted earlier today when a boat carry as many as 700 capsized, resulting in possibly the largest mass drowning since the migrant crisis began several years ago.

Initial reports said that only 28 of the 700 migrants had been rescued, though one report put the figure at 50. The disaster happened about 60 kilometres off the Libyan coast and about 200 kilometres south of the Italian island of Lampedusa, which lies roughly half way between Sicily and northwest Libya.

The emergency was declared at about midnight, local time, with more than a dozen Italian and Maltese ships taking part in the rescue, plus three helicopters. At midday Sunday, the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, said the rescue was ongoing. The vessel is believed to have capsized when the migrants shifted to one side of the vessel when a merchant ship approached. “At the moment, we fear that this is a tragedy of really vast proportions, UNHCR spokeswoman Carlotta Sami told SkyTG24 television.

Pope Francis has called on the European Union and the international community to do more to help Italy cope with unprecedented numbers of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean during journeys on smugglers’ boats to flee war, persecution or poverty.

With his popularity and deep concern for social issues, the pope gave Italy a boost in its lobbying for Brussels and northern EU countries to provide more assistance.

“I express my gratitude for the commitment that Italy is making to welcome the many migrants who, risking their life, ask to be taken in,” said Francis, flanked by Sergio Mattarella, the Italian president. “It’s evident that the proportions of the phenomenon require much broader involvement.”

“We must never tire of appealing for a more extensive commitment on the European and international level,” the pope said.

On Saturday, towns in the southern island of Sicily were running out of places to shelter the migrants, including 11,000 arrivals in the past eight days. At least another 400 people are known to have drowned.

Yet it’s not simply the fringe that’s the problem. I have a sneaking suspicion that while as a society we may use women’s sexuality to sell everything from cars to buffalo wings and beer, we really don’t like women actually engaging in sex on their own terms and having the ability to make certain to solely determine the results of those encounters.

For me, having spent 40 or more years fighting along my brothers and sisters for full equality for the LGBT community, I’m ready for a bit more two-way solidarity.

I’m ready to have the NCAA, with their supposed commitment to Title IX, refuse to play in Indiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, North Dakota and Arizona because these states are openly hostile to women and our constitutional rights.

I’m ready to have gay rights organizations, the media and corporations, such as Walmart, Google, NASCAR and Angie’s List, be as moved to action by Purvi Patel’s 20-year incarceration as they—and I—are about the refusal of a baker to make a wedding cake for same-sex celebrations.

And most of all I’m waiting for the kind of Act Up outrage that the abuse of women surely deserves.

And yes, I do feel the writer has a HUGE point. Read the entire thing. That of course does not mean the fight for LGBT is over, not by a long shot:

Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams said late Friday that she was “sincerely sorry” and that she would remove a link on her personal Facebook page that she shared that encouraged families to keep their students home Friday and “away from perverse indoctrination” of the“homosexual-bisexual-transsexual agenda.”

“To be honest with you, I didn’t read the article,” Williams said. “I just saw it and thought I was sharing information with parents.

An ugly vein of soccer fan excess — the chanting of anti-Semitic slurs — recently disgraced a Dutch soccer game, prompting officials of the home team, Utrecht, to apologize for shocking outcries from the stands like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” and “Jews burn the best!”

An angry diner viciously grabbed an Upper East Side restaurant manager by the neck and hurled him into an elderly woman after waiting an hour and a half for his omelette during a case of brunch rage Saturday afternoon.

About 1,000 gathered at the former site of the Oklahoma City federal building to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the terrorist bombing there that killed 168 people and injured many others.

Former President Bill Clinton and Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin were among those who spoke at Sunday’s service at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building once stood.

The service started with a 168-second moment of silence and concluded with survivors and tearful relatives of the dead reading the names of those killed in the April 19, 1995, attack, which remains the worst U.S. act of domestic terrorism.

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’slargest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

A “mysterious” disease that kills patients within 24 hours has claimed at least 18 lives in a south-eastern Nigerian town, the government said.

“Twenty-three people were affected and 18 deaths were recorded,” the Ondo state health commissioner, Dayo Adeyanju, said on Saturday.

The government spokesman for the state, Kayode Akinmade, earlier gave a toll of 17 dead.

“Seventeen people have died of the mysterious disease since it broke out early this week in Ode-Irele town,” Akinmade told AFP by telephone.

The disease, whose symptoms include headache, weight loss, blurred vision and loss of consciousness, killed the victims within a day of falling ill, he said.

Laboratory tests have so far ruled out Ebola or any other virus, Akinmade said.

The World Health Organisation meanwhile said it had information on 14 cases with at least 12 dead.

“Common symptoms were sudden blurred vision, headache, loss of consciousness followed by death, occurring within 24 hours,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told AFP by email, adding that an investigation was ongoing.

How horrible.

I will end this with a tweet from Stephen King that I think sums just about the entire 2016 GOP primary list so far:

Cruz, Paul and Rubio, all running for President. Hey, I thought I was supposed to write the horror stories.

A Georgia state representative is standing up for the rights of embryos: He wants to make sure they aren’t forced to glow in the dark.

Republican Rep. Tom Kirby, who has served since 2012, has posted a list of his top issues on his website. Among them he names the “ethical treatment of embryos,” which he notes includes a call to ban the mixing of human and jellyfish DNA.

The website states:

We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue. Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo. We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants. The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia. This bill is about protecting Human life while maintaining good, valid research that does not destroy life.

Kirby also introduced legislation last week that would make it unlawful for “any person or entity to intentionally or knowingly create or attempt to create an in vitro human embryo by any means other than fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm.”

“To make them glow in the dark is the only thing I know of,” he told Channel 2.

He also said he has not seen evidence that anyone in Georgia is trying to create human-jellyfish hybrids. “I’ve had people tell me it is, but I have not verified that for sure,” Kirby said. “It’s time we either get in front of it or we’re going to be chasing our tails.”

This is apparently not a new concern for Kirby. In a 2013 video posted on YouTube, he talked about banning human-animal hybrids.

“We’re going to stand up and say that Frankenstein-type science is not going to happen in Georgia anymore,” Kirby said. “That’s something that we really need to get rid of here.”

Sorry, but I had to quote that article in full…I could not help it. You have to forgive me. This is just fucked up beyond belief.

I mean, who needs “Frankenstein-type science” going on here in Georgia when we’ve got a proven Deliverance style of inbreeding program working in full force?

Never say that Georgia Republican Tom Kirby isn’t fighting for What Matters. Many politicians enter public service because there is something in their hearts that compels them to do it, for the good of their people, and Georgia state Rep. Tom Kirby is no exception. He will protect Georgians from the scourge of human jellyfish fetuses, because that his is calling in life! You didn’t know this was a problem affecting Georgia? That is because you are clearly stupid, let Tom’s website (the URL of which inexplicably ends with “pretty photo”) tell you:

We in Georgia are taking the lead on this issue.

Unlike the other 49, who are carelessly letting the glow-in-the-dark people run wild.

Human life at all stages is precious including as an embryo. We need to get out in front of the science and technology, before it becomes something no one wants. The mixing of Human Embryos with Jellyfish cells to create a glow in the dark human, we say not in Georgia.

Leave that to South Carolina or Alabama, let Lindsey Graham and Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore glow like gay nightlights, NOT IN GEORGIA. We are relieved that Tom will help us GET IN FRONT OF SCIENCE, because we all know what happens when science is in front of you, you learn things and make breakthroughs and suddenly everybody starts evolutioning each other, right in front of the children, NOT IN GEORGIA!

Tom just wants to make sure that when we do science, we are not destroying embryos, because Abortion, but we did not know that “light it up” was a third option between “let it become a beautiful baby” and “kill it!”

A beautiful greenishglow in the dark jellyfish freak baby who will probably end up on food stamps and addicted to crack….fucking jelly welfare queens.

He has not seen evidence, you guys, of anyone in Georgia doing the people-jellyfish, but it’s something that we “really need to get rid of” and that “is not going to happen in Georgia anymore.” You know that thing when you are having a hard time making a joke because the joke is already written? That is happening to your Wonkette right now, it is tough. Also, you don’t want to be chasing your tails on this issue, because you know who ELSE has a tail? Jellyfish. (No they don’t.)

Kirby also says in this here video that he is concerned about getting jellyfish embryos to do sex to cow embryos, effectively making glow-in-the-dark cows, and that is A Outrage, because that is cheating at the rules of Cow Tipping, it’s not fair if one team’s cows glow and the other ones don’t.

Anyway, nobody send Tom this article about how humans actually ALREADY glow in the dark, it will give him wingnut nightmares and he will wake up crying, because he is such a dipshit.

Not only is he a dipshit…he is a symbol of what this Country’s elected office has become. A whole domed building of legislator dipshits, (well, except for the ones who bring ovaries to the Hill: Study: Women in the Senate Get Shit Done.) These dipshits…bought and paid for by two rich ass dipshit brothers…set on destroying the world as we know it. Now when are we going to see a summer blockbuster movie about that?

Now, I really have some disturbing links for you today, so what I am going to do is put them up first and then hit ya with a lot of fun stuff. Okay?

Last week saw the launch of the Femicide Census, a list of murdered women that digs down into the internet like a terrible well. It was reported at length in this paper, in a piece that detailed what has changed since Karen Ingala Smith first started counting dead women in 2012, and contained tributes to some of the victims, pictured smiling and beautiful, looking off to the side of the photos, shy.

Since that piece was published though, it’s likely that in the UK alone, four more women have been murdered by their partners. This thing is going to take some time. The numbers continue to rise. These deaths are being defined not just as murders, but as “femicide”, because these are very particular deaths. These 150 women, the word acknowledges, were killed for being women. They were killed for being women because killing women is the endgame of inequality. So the word is important, because it defines their deaths as sexist acts, as tragedies that we are all witness to. The aim of the census is to connect the cases in order to analyse this violence properly, and then to end it.

Patterns are already clear. There were more than 64,000 sexual offences recorded by police last year, Ingala Smith tells me, and 1.4 million domestic violence assaults against women. “When men kill women,” she wants to stress, “they are doing so in the context of a society in which men’s violence against women is entrenched and systemic. When misogyny, sexism and the objectification of women are so pervasive that they are all but inescapable, can a man killing a women ever not be a sexist act?”

An aside: since the launch, reports of the census have inevitably been pissed on with the question: “What about the men?” Like the commenter’s cliché “Not all men”, it’s a question noisily applied to derail feminist arguments, and sometimes it is worth answering and sometimes, well, no. This time, the what-about-the-menners are claiming that in concentrating solely on female victims the census is itself sexist. But when men kill their partners they have usually been abusing them for years. When women kill, they themselves have usually been abused. In the decade up to 2012, 93.9% of adults who were convicted of murder were men. So.

Read more at the link, but to illustrate a point that this census makes…

A 26-year-old single mother from Houston was shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend just hours after she reported him to authorities, KHOU-TV reported.

Investigators said the suspect went to Takita Mathieu’s workplace on Thursday afternoon and shot her before turning the gun on himself in an apparent murder-suicide attempt. However, he survived and was listed as being on life support as of Friday at a local hospital.

The Houston Chronicle reported that, according to witnesses, the suspect argued with Mathieu before the shooting. A semi-automatic pistol, believed to be the weapon, was found at the scene.

Mathieu had reportedly filed multiple complaints with the police about the suspect’s “erratic” behavior and harassment leading up to the shooting. Authorities said the man called her 140 times since she ended the relationship four months ago.

The victim’s cousin, Morris Williams, told KHOU that she was afraid to return to Houston after visiting family in Louisiana for Mardi Gras festivities.

“To see her daughter just to grow up without her mother is very sad,” Williams said.

What can you say to this woman’s daughter, who saw her mother trying to do the right thing by turning to the authorities and courts…ugh.

At the time I wrote for Salon in late August, (Michael) Peroutka had only recently convened a press conference, under severe pressure, in which he insisted that he wasn’t a racist—those who attacked him were—and that he had no intention of leaving the League of the South. However, in mid-October, just two weeks before the election, the Baltimore Sun reported that he had left the League, around the time my story had run, but for inexplicable reasons:

Peroutka, a Millersville Republican, said he left the group prior to Labor Day because he discovered statements members made on the subject of being opposed to interracial marriage were “contrary to my beliefs.” He would not elaborate.

Though his League of the South membership drew criticism during the campaign — “Everybody wants to talk about League of the South all the time,” he said — the decision to quit the group was not politically motivated, Peroutka said.

“I didn’t do it to bring up any political points,” Peroutka said. “I dont have any problem with the organization.”

Peroutka said he still stands by the group’s stances on self-government and conserving southern heritage.

Even in its own terms, the account was nonsensical, since he remains quite friendly with Hill, who is himself opposed to racial intermarriage. But that’s relatively common among Southern conservatives: about 20 percent of them held such views from 2000 to 2012, according to the General Social Survey. Given that the League of the South appeals overwhelmingly to this demographic, it would have been truly shocking if there weren’t members who felt this way. What did Peroutka expect to find there? Who’s he trying to kid?

At the same time, the League’s official policy since its founding had been opposed to racial integration in the private sector—artfully phrased by saying, “we believe in a Southern society that…. Values and sustains true freedom of association.” As Rand Paul will tell you, “true freedom of association” means discrimination. And Peroutka never had a problem with that.

In short, his resignation was just political theater: Peroutka needed an opportunity to perform the pretense of anti-racism, without actually doing or saying anything to alienate his like-minded base. That finely-tuned balance was precisely the point, and it worked perfectly with those who wanted to believe his performance, who were just enough to help him get elected in the GOP wave, with a little extra help from a Nixon-style, last-minute dirty-trick anti-gay robocall, which Peroutka also unconvincingly denied any knowledge of.

This is how Peroutka operates, a master of contradictory mixed message delivery, highly skilled at crafting beautiful lies in the best Southern tradition. He’s closely aligned with the Southern secessionist white supremacist base, but he’s particularly focused on trying to make it seem mainstream, spinning out an alternative-history view of the world. As happened here, this sometimes requires him to play distancing games, but he effortlessly paired that distancing with blatantly open assurances of continued allegiance.

Peroutka and Moore both make a similar basic argument. Its full-blown form runs as follows: Gay marriage is against “God’s law,” and the Constitution is based on “God’s law” (the Bible), ergo gay marriage is unconstitutional, and judges who say otherwise are violating their oaths, and need not be obeyed—in fact, they should be impeached, and if not, their continued officeholding may be grounds for (a) nullification and/or (b) secession, because it is a form of tyranny. Peroutka has openly touched all the bases on this argument, while Moore has at least gone as far as calling for impeachment, as Sara Posner reports, but no one should be surprised if he’s willing to go all the way. The ease with which he ignored a Supreme Court ruling—declining to stay the same-sex marriage order—certainly would suggest that he might be just as comfortable with nullification and secession as his good friend Michael Peroutka is.

That is just part of the middle of the article…read the whole thing at the link.

A Louisiana elected official accused of sexually assaulting his former wife watched pornography on his government computer and left a threatening note to his alleged victim, prosecutors said.

St. Bernard Parish President Dave Peralta was indicted in April on sexual battery charges in connection with an October 2013 attack on his then-wife, who is accused of handcuffing, tying to the ceiling, beating, and sexually assaulting.

Investigators said Peralta, a Republican from Meraux, frequently viewed explicit videos depicting bondage and forced sex on his personal and work computers, and they also found a handwritten note that appears to threaten his then-wife with assault.

“Your going to be a rape victim,” the note reads. “Put on heels, skirt & a blouse you don’t care if it gets ruined. Text me when you are ready and come downstairs.”

The note is not signed or dated, but prosecutors said it was written by Peralta and discovered during a July search of his home.

[…]

The 107-page court filing accused Peralta of using his position to intimidate his former wife, who worked as a paralegal for the parish government.

Prosecutors said Peralta retaliated against his former wife after she tried to expose his alleged gambling addiction.

He also threatened to expose sexually explicit photos of her to force the woman to drop her accusations against him during their divorce proceedings, investigators said.

Peralta was also charged with felony stalking in another parish after he was accused of sending threatening emails to his ex-wife.

A grand jury is considering a possible malfeasance in office charge against him, as well.

The picture of the mug shots are enough to get you even more pissed. The dude is smirking…

A pair of parents in Glendale, Oregon, were charged with murder by abuse this week in the starvation death of their seven-week-old son. According to local news outlet KPIC, police believe Amanda Hancock used breast milk for lactation porn “instead of feeding the child.” Stephen Williams, the father, also allegedly worked in online porn.

Deputies from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office responded to a call about an infant in distress on January 22. Data Hancock, the baby boy, died on the scene, and Williams and Amanda Hancock were arrested following a monthlong investigation, during which medical examiners determined that starvation was the time of death.

Hancock and Williams told police that they fed Data milk several times a day, KPIC reports, but admitted that they did not properly care for him in general. Williams said that he noticed that the baby was losing weight, but did not call a doctor because he believed that to be Hancock’s responsibility.

An advisory panel of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors has recommended closing three academic centers, including a poverty center and one dedicated to social change, inciting outrage among liberals who believe that conservatives in control of state government are targeting ideological opponents in academia.

Conservatives are cheering the move, seeing it as a corrective to a higher education system they believe has lent its imprimatur to groups that engage in partisan activism.

A Catholic church there, the Star of the Sea, decided to stop allowing girls to be altar servers. Existing girls who are serving can continue but new ones will not be accepted.

Imagine how you would feel if you were one of those “mistake, oops” girls! To allow them to continue doesn’t patch up the rejection.

But it’s all perfectly fine, because there are parents in the congregation who like the idea of boys-only (in a church of male-priests-only) and because the priest behind this “innovation,” one Joseph Illo, argues that the change is great for male bonding and makes sense as being an altar server could be the first step to becoming a priest and — duh — girls cannot become priests ever. The logic is beautiful and very clear and in my divine opinion backwards.

The Rev. Joseph Illo recently banned the use of altar girls at school and parish Masses at Star of the Sea, a decision opposed by some parents and staff.
Illo also upset families when he decided that non-Catholic students could no longer receive blessings during Communion, a decision he reversed after complaints from the school community.
And this week, parents revealed that Star of the Sea students as young as those in second grade received a pamphlet about confession late last year that referred to sexual topics such as sodomy, masturbation and abortion.

That was a mistake, Illo said Wednesday.
“Among the 70 items for reflection, some were not age appropriate for schoolchildren,” Illo said in a statement. “We apologize for this oversight and removed the pamphlet as soon as this was brought to our attention by the school faculty in December.”

They asked questions such as, “Did I perform impure acts by myself (masturbation) or with another (adultery, fornication and sodomy)?” and, “Did I practice artificial birth control or was I or my spouse prematurely sterilized (tubal ligation or vasectomy)?” as well as, “Have I had or advised anyone to have an abortion?”
Riley Brooks, an 11-year-old student at the school, explained how he and his sixth-grade classmates responded to the material: they were “really grossed out.” “There was something about masturbation,” Brooks told the Chronicle. “Pretty sure abortion was on there, but I can’t remember. And sodomy. I don’t know what that means.”

Put all that together and Illo, a presumably celibate man in power inside a church which assigns most power to celibate men, comes across as someone who just may have a slight problem with women and women’s sexuality. The irony in that is more than I can quite absorb.

As I read this piece in the Washington Post yesterday I felt sicker and sicker. It’s about the deep psychological toll that many feminist writers endure when they publish online.

The underlying problem is well documented. Thanks to the Internet and social media, a message can reach more people, via fewer gatekeepers, than ever before. But that freedom of movement for information has also allowed groups of highly organized trolls to pummel and pummel in highly targeted and efficient ways they couldn’t before. Often the targets of those trolls are women.

Women who receive this kind of daily onslaught are often faced with two possible outcomes: The first is that they stand their ground, knowing that the attacks will keep coming, and that they’ll likely spend the rest of their lives battling the damage to their psyche. Or, they agree to be silenced and spend the rest of their lives in a mixture of guilt and sadness that they “allowed” the bullies to win.

As I said, those were some heavy duty links. Be sure to take a look at the rest of the articles if you have a chance…I think you will find these interesting:

Wes Anderson’s Oscar-nominated film does something few art forms have managed: It offers a funny, but respectful, reflection on the horrors of the Holocaust.

Like so many others, I spent last month’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in remembrance of the Holocaust. I quietly contemplated the past, thought about family members who had survived, and those who had perished, attended a commemorative ceremony, said Kaddish, and shed some tears. And then I watched a comedy—Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is nominated for nine Academy Awards at this Sunday’s ceremony.

How can comedy ever be appropriate when it comes to remembering such solemn events? I first asked that question about the film three years ago, before it was even made. At the time I was the U.S. Ambassador in Prague, and the filmmakers reached out to say that they were researching a movie set in the fictional land of Zubrowka (a stand in for the Czech lands) during the 1930s, concluding in 1938 and told in flashback from 1968 (two very bleak years in Czech history, marking the Nazi and the Soviet invasions). Would I help?

I hope that Anderson wins for best screenplay. Read the rest at that link, it is a good review.

Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award for 1939’s Gone With the Wind, wrote this touching piece in a 1947 issue of The Hollywood Reporter.

An utterance of a first century Jewish scholar, “I am became all things to all men,” can very aptly be applied to Hollywood — film city of the world. To the blue-nosed moralist, it is a city of gin and sin. To a producer, it is an exacting place of business. To the actor or actress, it is a powerful potentate, holding in its hands honor or oblivion. To the tourist from Salt Lake, or Peoria, or Milwaukee, Hollywood is a man-made fairyland.

Two separate polarizing debates attached themselves to the 87th Academy Awards long before the red carpets were unfurled. Are the dearth of African-American nominees and the low count of Selma noms indicative of a colorblind selection process, or of entrenched racism? Is American Sniper a chilling view of the personal costs of war, or unadulterated propaganda?

There’s a chance these pressure points will pop up during Sunday night’s broadcast from the Dolby Theatre. But will any potential eruptions dislodge one of these 10 historical moments of political theater as played out live on the Oscar stage?

1940: Hattie McDaniel’s Long Walk to Gold

Way back at the 12th Academy Awards, Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for best supporting actress, which on the surface is an ordinary big deal. An actress wins the best supporting award every year, and the film McDaniel was nominated for, Gone With the Wind, raked in eight Oscars. Hattie McDaniel’s big deal is that she was the first African-American ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, and she won it, too. When her name was announced in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, McDaniel stood up, way back in the room, and started the long walk down toward the stage from the segregated dining table.

Back in January we told you about Rowan Hansen, an 11-year-old comic lover who hand-wrote a letter to DC sharing her frustration over gendered toys and lack of representation for female fans.

Nearly a month later, Rowan and her message that “girls read comics, too” are still gaining traction, with the fifth-grader appearing on an NBC Today segment this morning to talk about her favorite heroes, the impracticality of most female battle armor, and accept a token of DC’s “commitment to fulfill their promise” to create more “superhero fun for girls.”

I say that this Super Rowan needs to star in her own Summer Blockbuster soon! I can’t wait to see SR kicking some anti-Jellyfish People, Science denying, PLUB women hating, GOP Mens Club members.

This is an open thread…yeah, I said open thread. You wanna start somethin’?

Good Morning!!

Have you ever wondered how extremely young men are able to get jobs at elite newspapers like The Washington Post right out of college?

Take for example T. Rees Shapiro, who has led the charge to not only discredit the Rolling Stone story on the problem of rape on the University of Virginia campus but also efforts to dismiss and humiliate Jackie, one of the women interviewed by Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdley .

However flawed the Rolling Stone article may have been, it was about much more than Jackie’s story. It illustrated a culture of minimization of rape that had existed had UVA for at least 30 years, in which women who reported being sexually assaulted were discouraged from going to the police, their complaints were not treated seriously, and accused perpetrators were not seriously investigated or punished.

Shapiro’s career has been greatly enhanced by his dismantling of Jackie’s story about a violent rape that allegedly took place in 2012. As a consequence of his efforts to dismantle Jackie’s story, T. Rees Shapiro has appeared on numeroustelevision programs and received praise from many quarters. Most likely his youth enabled Shapiro to con Jackie into trusting him enough to talk to him “several times.”

Last night, I decided to take a quick look at young Mr. Shapiro and his career development path. How did he get such an elite journalism job at the young age of 27?

In 2009, Shapiro graduated from Virginia Tech, where he wrote for the student newspaper. In 2010, he was hired by the Washington Post as a copy boy. He soon graduated to writing obituaries, and in 2010 became an education reporter for the Post.

Clearly T. Rees (Nicknamed “Trees,” get it?) is a real go-getter, but he also has connections. His father Leonard Shapiro was a sportswriter for The Washington Post for 38 years, and his mother Vicky Moon is a writer and photographer who is apparently a fixture in Virginia society. Would Shapiro have gotten the Washington Post job without those connections? Maybe, but I doubt it.

In his critiques of the Rolling Stone article and specifically of Jackie’s story, Shapiro chose not to write about the other women who were interviewed by author Sabrina Rubin Erdley or to get input from experts on rape and traumatic memory. Would a more mature reporter have done so, rather than simply picking apart Jackie’s story? Would a female education reporter have thought to do that?

Leonard Shapiro, former WaPo sportswriter and father of T. Rees Shapiro

Four universities in Virginia are currently being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for possible Title IX violations specifically related to sexual violence — JMU, the University of Virginia, the College of William & Mary and the University of Richmond. Two other schools in the state, the Virginia Military Institute and Virginia Commonwealth University, faced Title IX reviews that concluded this spring….

Each of the investigations at the Virginia schools, like that at JMU, was sparked by federal complaints.

UVA’s investigation is unusual in that it started in 2011, but remains open. The Education Department declined to say why the investigation was so long-running, and noted “that some cases take longer than others due to the nature and complexity of the issues involved.”

Another Washington Post reporter, Nick Anderson, writes that the inconsistencies in Jackie’s story will not end the federal investigation of UVA.

The University of Virginia was under the microscope for its handling of sexual assault cases long before Rolling Stone magazine weighed in with the account of a student who said she was gang-raped at a fraternity house.

The emergence of fresh questions about that account — including the fraternity issuing a rebuttal, doubts voiced by some who know the woman, and a statement from Rolling Stone’s managing editor on Friday acknowledging “discrepancies” in her version of events — will not suddenly cancel that scrutiny.

A federal investigation of U-Va.’s response to sexual violence, begun in June 2011, continues. It is one of the longest-running active probes of its kind in the nation. U-Va. remains one of the most prominent of about 90 colleges and universities facing such investigations by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Student and faculty activists for sexual assault prevention, given a national platform in recent days, are unlikely to let the issue fade away. Skeptics will still wonder why the university has not expelled anyone for sexual misconduct in the past decade. Parents of prospective applicants, also mindful of the slaying of sophomore Hannah Graham after she disappeared in September, still want assurances that the Charlottesville campus is safe.

Since rape on campus is such a huge issue, shouldn’t education reporters like T. Rees Shapiro be more knowledgeable about sexual assault and its traumatic effects? One journalist, Francesca Bessey thinks so.

The actual discrepancies introduced by the Washington Post are few: one, the individual whom Jackie claimed brought her to the fraternity was apparently a member of a different fraternity; and, two, a student who allegedly came to Jackie’s aid claimed she initially gave a different account of what happened that night. The fraternity also released a statement denying knowledge of the assault, or that there was a social function the night Jackie believes she was assaulted.

For someone who knows little to nothing about rape, fraternities, or the contemporary college party scene — which unfortunately seems to characterize a lot of the coverage thus far — these discrepancies might initially seem like gaping holes in Jackie’s story.

However, as any medical professional or victim advocate will tell you, trauma-related memory inconsistencies are extraordinarily common in cases of sexual assault, often manifesting in the survivor describing the incident to first responders as less severe than it actually was. Such plasticity of memory is not unique to rape cases; the FBI, for example, notes that “there can be a wide range of after effects to a trauma,” which can impact on a victim of a violent crime or the victim’s family members. A list of these effects includes confusion, disorientation, memory loss and slowed thinking. Psychological research has long demonstrated that humans reconstruct, rather than recall, memory, which is why eyewitness testimony is considered one of the most dubious forms of evidence in a court of law.

Why have journalists covering this story given more credence to statements by the fraternity and friends who were portrayed very negatively in the Rolling Stone article than to Jackie’s version of events?

…it is important to note that the so-called “inconsistencies” in Jackie’s story don’t necessarily invalidate her version of events. The fraternity’s statement is in no way more credible than Jackie’s own word — in fact, I would argue less so, given the sheer prevalence of fraternity rape. It would be foolish to assume that a fraternity’s formal denial of “knowledge of these alleged acts” means that they did not occur (with or without current leadership’s knowledge), as it would be foolish to rule out that the “date function” Jackie thought she was invited to wasn’t pure pretense in the first place. It is also within the realm of possibility that Jackie was brought to the party by a man who didn’t necessarily belong to the fraternity, even that he misled her about his membership in the frat. It is also possible that the student who gave a different version of how he found Jackie that night, lacks credibility or is himself having trouble recalling events.

Ultimately, these are all details significant to a police or journalistic investigation, upon which the responsibility is on law enforcement and journalists to figure out. For Jackie, however, it doesn’t change much. It doesn’t change her experience of violent assault, or those of countless students like her, many of whose stories are also featured in the article in question. It does not change the majority of the material in the original article: not the debasing lyrics of the UVA fight song; not the person who hurled a bottle at Jackie’s face the first time she tried to speak out; not the 38 students who appeared in Dean Nicole Eramo’s office in just one academic year to discuss incidents of sexual assault, despite the fact that not one student has ever been expelled from UVA for a sexual offense.

In light of these facts, in light of my own rape and the rapes of too many of my friends at the hands of their peers, I do wonder: Whose credibility is really to be doubted here? Jackie’s or the public peanut gallery that has diluted sexual assault down to a number and a date?

Again, I don’t want to personally denigrate T. Rees Shapiro. He writes well, and he has done a fine job of locating sources at the University of Virginia–both in this case and in his previous reporting on in writing on the Hannah Graham murder case–probably because his youth helps him connect with college students only a few years younger than he is. But his analysis of a survivor’s story has suffered from his lack of knowledge and experience about campus sexual assault and rape in general.

I want to share two more articles that offer a more sophisticated take on these subjects–written by women with long journalistic experience.

We don’t yet know all the facts behind the now-infamous, poorly fact-checked story in Rolling Stone about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. What we do know: Rolling Stone at first blamed the alleged victim, “Jackie” — rather than its own journalistic sloppiness — for so-called “discrepancies” (before changing its callous statement).

And new reporting by the Washington Post does reveal that Jackie’s friends, cited in the story, say they are skeptical about some of the details. Still, they all believe that Jackie experienced something “horrific” that night, in the words of one, and we do know that Jackie stands by her story. Most of the doubts about it were apparently raised by those she’s accusing, including the fraternity and main alleged assailant — whom, I guess, we’re supposed to believe instead. But one other thing we do know is that gang rapes just like what Jackie is alleging do happen — too often, and all over America.

While Rolling Stone’s reporting was clearly shoddy, some writers who initially poked holes in Jackie’s story did so for ideological motives. For instance, even before the reporting lapses were revealed, conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg called Jackie’s story unbelievable. “It is not credible,” Goldberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t believe it.”

Instead, Goldberg insisted, Jackie’s account was “a convenient conversation for an exposé of rape culture,” something, incidentally, Goldberg also doubts to be real. “‘Rape culture’ suggests that there is a large and obvious belief system that condones and enables rape as an end in itself in America,” Goldberg later wrote in National Review. It’s all hogwash, says Goldberg, alleging that the very idea of “rape culture” is just “an elaborate political lie intended to strengthen the hand of activists.”

In other words, whatever the reality of what happened to Jackie, Goldberg and others were skeptical because they simply don’t believe rapes like that happen with the participation of groups of assailants, let alone the complicity of bystanders. This is where they’re mistaken.

Kohn then lists several extreme examples of gang rapes that resemble Jackie’s description–most of which we have covered here.

Historians could look back on this year as the beginning of feminism’s third wave.

The year was momentous for feminism. For the first time, rape victims and their supporters emerged from the shadows in significant numbers and started naming names — to significant effect. Women, their voices amplified by social media and with the support of a small but growing cohort of men, have been exposing and shaming venerable American institutions such as the NFL, Ivy League and non-Ivy League colleges, and the entertainment icon Bill Cosby.

First wave feminists won the right to vote. The second wave got us the right to work. But even with those advances, women have remained fundamentally restricted by the threat and terrible secret of sexual assault.

This year, emboldened and connected by social media, college women formed a powerful grassroots movement that led to universities such as Harvard being publicly named and shamed for not addressing women’s rape reports. They brought the issue of campus sexual assault into the White House, where Barack Obama became the first President to use the words “sexual violence.” The Department of Education released a list of universities under investigation for mishandling sexual violence cases, often letting even repeat predators off with barely a slap on the wrist.

These young women had been silent until social media enabled them to come together, even though thousands of miles apart, share debilitating secrets and then act with the confidence that safety in numbers provided.

I hope you’ll read the rest at the link.

I only hope that irresponsible journalism perpetrated by Rolling Stone and the even more irresponsible reaction to it have not set back the cause of protecting young women on college campuses from sexual violence.

Good Morning!!

I’m feeling very overwhelmed this morning, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Between the police killings of civilians and the UVA rape story, I don’t know where to turn for relief.

Last night I escaped for awhile by watching the season finale of “Z Nation,” which is a very violent show about a group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse that almost seems like a metaphor for our sick society.

Why are people so fascinated by zombies at this time in history? Is it because so many of us are dead inside, with no empathy for our fellow humans? Hatred of anyone who is not a white, wealthy, straight “christian” male born in the USA has taken over so many of us and transformed our culture in so many ugly ways.

It’s as if a virus was loosed on the population–in the Reagan years?–and those of us who still care for other people and dream of equal rights and protection for all people are left fighting just to stay conscious–like the survivors in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

But rape is different. Any woman who reports being raped in the good old USA must be scrutinized in detail, because she probably was asking for it or is lying. She must tell what she was wearing, whether she was drinking, whether she knew the perpetrator, whether she is just claiming rape because she regrets having sex while drunk, and on and on and on.

Then yesterday afternoon Will Dana, managing editor of Rolling Stone basically threw Erdely’s source “Jackie” under the bus, suggesting that she had fabricated her story. Dana apparently took the word of members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity that “Jackie’s” story was untrue.

As someone who was traumatized as a child and who has had to deal with posttraumatic stress disorder for much of my life, I took it personally. At first I could not stand to read the accusatory articles, so I went to Twitter first. There I learned that many men and women were pushing back against the media victim-blaming. They had started posting tweets with the hashtag #IStandWithJackie. Reading many of those tweets gave me the strength to read some of yesterday’s backlash articles.

Because I’m really not ready to write a coherent post right now, I’m just going to link to some articles that you may want to check out.

The story that triggered yesterday’s backlash was by T. Rees Shapiro and published at The Washington Post: Key elements of Rolling Stone’s U-Va. gang rape allegations in doubt. Shapiro, like Rolling Stone’s Will Dana, accepts the word of the accused fraternity that there was no party on the date given by “Jackie” and the word of a man she accused that he never met “Jackie.” Jackie’s compelling story is apparently eclipsed for the Post by these unproven assertions by unnamed men who have every reason to lie to protect themselves and their fraternity.

Here are some “key elements” of the WaPo story for me:

Jackie, who spoke to The Washington Post several times during the past week, stood by her account, offering a similar version and details.

“I never asked for this” attention, she said in an interview. “What bothers me is that so many people act like it didn’t happen. It’s my life. I have had to live with the fact that it happened — every day for the last two years.” ….

Jackie describes her interactions with Erdely and Rolling Stone:

Overwhelmed by sitting through interviews with the writer, Jackie said she asked Erdely to be taken out of the article. She said Erdely refused, and Jackie was told that the article would go forward regardless.

Jackie said she finally relented and agreed to participate on the condition that she be able to fact-check her parts in the story, which she said Erdely agreed to.

“I didn’t want the world to read about the worst three hours of my life, the thing I have nightmares about every night,” Jackie said.

About the article itself:

Jackie told The Post that she felt validated that the article encouraged other female students to come forward saying that they, too, had been sexually assaulted in fraternity houses.

“Haven’t enough people come forward at this point?” she said. “How many people do you need to come forward saying they’ve been raped at a fraternity to make it real to you? They need to acknowledge it’s a problem. They need to address it instead of pointing fingers to take the blame off themselves.”

Trauma has powerful effects on the brain, and it’s not at all surprising that survivors’ memories can be confused and inconsistent. In fact, even normal human memory is not designed to recall every detail of events with precision, and expecting that from a rape victim is ridiculous and unfair. But that’s the way it is.

“Jackie” did not even report her rape to the police, because she felt she couldn’t handle the backlash. Now a magazine that didn’t stand by its own story has made her vulnerable to attacks from all over the world.

Where is author Sabrina Rubin Erdely? Why isn’t she defending her story?

Last night on Twitter, Jamison Foser called attention to the fact that the WaPo story originally claimed as fact that Jackie was lying. Then they changed the line in the story without noting they had made a correction. That’s a pretty big “mistake” for a newspaper that has been busily trying to debunk “Jackie’s” story for the past couple of weeks.

Now some important articles that push back against the backlash, yesterday’s WaPo story, and Rolling Stone’s betrayal of “Jackie.” Some of these were published before the RS reversal, but I still think they are relevant.

Good Morning!!

Just look at those awful teenage girls wearing coats in a bookstore! How shocking! And the President in jeans and casual jacket! Impeach him immediately!

As everyone knows by now, GOP aide to Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN) Elizabeth Lauten learned the hard way that when you attack the President’s family on Facebook, lots of people see it; and then your ugly words go viral on Twitter and other social media sites.

Addressing her comments directly to the Obama girls, Lauten wrote that they should ‘‘respect the part you play,’’ and added: ‘‘Then again your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the ‘good role model’ department.’’

Lauten also urged the Obama girls to ‘‘dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.’’

Lauten later apologized for the comments and deleted the original post, which drew harsh criticism across social media.

In her pathetic “apology,” as Eugene Robinson noted on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, Lauten failed to say she was sorry for insulting any of the members of the Obama family.

‘‘When I first posted on Facebook I reacted to an article and I quickly judged the two young ladies in a way that I would never have wanted to be judged myself as a teenager,’’ Lauten told The Commercial Appeal of Memphis in an email. ‘‘Please know, those judgmental feelings truly have no place in my heart. Furthermore, I’d like to apologize to all of those who I have hurt and offended with my words.’’

Whatever, lady. I’m glad you’re out of a job. Instant Karma is so satisfying.

Eugene Robinson

Speaking of f**king a**holes, I’ve managed for a long time now to avoid seeing or hearing anything about MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” or its moronic hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Unfortunately, this morning I accidentally clicked on a link to Mediaite and read something about their asinine TV show.

This morning the above-mentioned Eugene Robinson was on the program and dared to say that Michael Brown might have had his hands up when he was shot and killed by Darren Wilson. Robinson’s reasoning? A number of eyewitnesses said so and there’s nothing in the evidence that proves Brown wasn’t surrendering.

According to Mediaite’s Evan McMurry, things “got awkward.”

“I don’t believe there’s anything in the record, certainly not in the forensic evidence, that precludes the possibility that he had his hands up at some point when he was approaching the officer,” Robinson said.

“That’s an awfully low standard,” cohost Joe Scarborough replied. “There’s also no evidence that doesn’t suggest a flying saucer from Venus swooped over all of them. There’s no evidence that it’s precluded, Gene. I’m not being difficult. I’m just saying the truth actually does matter.”

“I think it’s a very uncomfortable question for you, Gene,” Brzezinski said. “Because if you say no, there’s no evidence his hands up, you’re probably insulting a lot of people. Do you feel uncomfortable with the question?”

Now what do you suppose Brzezinski meant by that? Oh yeah, Robinson is black and so Mika thinks he must have to lie in order to pacify other black people. Are you lying to please your puppet master Joe Scarborough and the racist audience to your show, Mika?

You can watch the video at the Mediaite link above.

The racists are also up in arms about the five St. Louis Rams players (all black) who had the nerve to express solidarity with Ferguson protesters by standing with their hands up before their football game on Sunday. St. Louis police officers were enraged by this mild display of support, and complained loudly in the media.

St. Louis police chief Jon Belmar then publicly claimed that the Rams organization had apologized for the players actions. A battle of words followed, in which the Rams denied apologizing and Belmar kept insisting they had. From the NY Daily News:

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said the St. Louis Rams apologized to local law enforcement officials Monday after five players walked onto the field Sunday with their arms raised high in solidarity with the Ferguson protesters, a claim the team denied in a bizarre war of words that erupted overnight between the team and cops.

Police immediately cried foul at the act during the Rams’ Week 13 home blowout of the Oakland Raiders, but the NFL sacked the cops’ request and chose not to discipline the players.

There was still fallout to manage and Rams COO Kevin Demoff tried to satisfy the outcry by local cops when he called Belmar on Monday and apologized for the players’ unsanctioned actions, according to the chief.

“Mr. Demoff clearly regretted that any members of the Ram’s (sic) organization would act in a way that minimized the outstanding work that police officers and departments carry out each and every day,” Belmar said in an email to the department, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. “My impression of the call was that it was heartfelt and I assured him that I would share it with my staff.” ….

And Demoff backed up that claim when reached by the Post-Dispatch late Monday. “In none of these conversations did I apologize for our players’ actions,” Demoff told the Post-Dispatch. “I did say in each conversation that I regretted any offense their officers may have taken. We do believe it is possible to both support our players’ First Amendment rights and support the efforts of local law enforcement as our community begins the process of healing.”

My advice to Belmar and police departments all over the country: Get over it and stop killing innocent citizens.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner will try to sell fellow Republicans this week on a government spending bill that avoids a shutdown fight but allows the party to strike back at President Barack Obama’s immigration order.

Republicans have a lot riding on their handling of must-pass government funding. Having scored huge wins in Nov. 4 voting that handed them a majority in the Senate and gave them a bigger majority in the House, Republican leaders want to demonstrate that they can govern responsibly next year.

But many are still outraged that Obama bypassed Congress and is moving ahead unilaterally on immigration, granting what they claim is “amnesty” to people who came to the United States illegally.

House Republicans will meet on Tuesday after a 10-day Thanksgiving break to discuss their response, including a leading option for Boehner that would fund most government agencies through September 2015, with only a short-term extension for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

House Republican lawmakers and aides say this would give them a chance to use their stronger House and Senate majorities next year to pass explicit spending restrictions on some DHS agencies, to try to stop Obama’s immigration overhaul.

More details from Bloomberg Politics:

House Speaker John Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders are turning to large-animal veterinarian and Tea Party darling Ted Yoho to help avoid a second government shutdown in as many years.

The freshman Florida Republican has proposed a bill that aims to remove the president’s executive power when it comes to deportations. It’s a symbolic measure that would have essentially zero chance of passing in the last days of a Democratic-controlled Senate. But Boehner and his crew hope it’s enough to pacify a Republican caucus seething over President Barack Obama’s immigration actions last month.

Boehner and other Republican leaders have vowed to avoid a repeat of the 16-day shutdown last year. Their best shot may be coupling Yoho’s bill with a measure that would temporarily fund immigration agencies and provide longer-term financing for the rest of the federal government. The deadline is Dec. 11, when current funding ends.

Yoho, whose opposition to Obamacare contributed to the last shutdown, was an unlikely star of the 2012 election cycle, knocking off 12-term incumbent Cliff Stearns in a Republican primary for a North Florida district after selling his veterinary practice to run. Since being sworn in, the 59-year-old Republican has voted against Boehner for speaker, said an Obamacare tax on indoor tanning was “racist,” and suggested that a government shutdown could stabilize markets.

Yoho sounds like a lunatic. How on earth do people like this get elected?

Bill Cassidy tries to smile and fails miserably.

Speaking of lunatics, last night I watched the final debate between Louisiana Senate candidates Bill Cassidy and Mary Landrieu. If the result of the runoff election on Saturday weren’t so important, the “debate” would have been a laugh riot. The main topics were abortion, guns, Obamacare, Cassidy’s double dipping at the expense of taxpayers and Landrieu’s weak support of the hated black President.

It was difficult to listen to what Cassidy was saying, because he is so strange-looking, and when he forces a smile, he looks like something out of a vampire movie. Even though Mary Landrieu is a pretty conservative Democrat, I couldn’t help liking her when I noticed she had a hard time not laughing out loud when Cassidy was talking.

Landrieu worked her main allegation, that Cassidy billed Louisiana State University for work he didn’t perform, into answers throughout the debate. She said it’s an issue that should follow him beyond Saturday’s election.

“If he wins, he will be fighting more than President Obama. He will be fighting subpoenas because he padded his time sheet,” Landrieu said. “He’ll talk about everyone else’s record but his own.”

Cassidy denied the allegations and defended his record. “These charges are absolutely false. The Landrieu campaign takes these charges, and they twist them anyway they can. I’m proud of the work I’ve done at LSU,” Cassidy said.

A physician, Cassidy said his work at LSU hospitals helped people, while Landrieu’s charter flights helped only her. Landrieu countered that she had taken responsibility for the flights, which she attributed to a bookkeeping error, and paid back the Treasury.

Read more at the link.

During their extended argument over abortion, I was surprised to hear Cassidy state as fact that a 20-month fetus is viable and capable of feeling pain. I was also shocked when Landrieu said she is against all abortions and thinks they are immoral, but that the government shouldn’t be making those decisions. At least she’s “pro-choice.”

After watching that debate, I thanked my lucky stars that my Senators are Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey.

That’s about all the news I could dredge up this morning. I’ll be so glad when the holidays come to an end. What stories are you following today?

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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.

You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.